[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

This week’s POETS Day enemy de jour de week is streaming video, not for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing, but for affordably bringing entertainment of the highest and decidedly other quality to the consumer at a time and place of the consumer’s choosing and making us soft. Our leisure is lurching towards too accommodating. They are waging war against our sense of what it means to have an event. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch Knight Rider, you had to be on the couch at seven on a Friday night and turn the pliers to NBC or, and I swear this happened, your dad would tell you that it’s “No big deal,” because “They’ll re-run it over the summer.” Those were tough times, but we were tough kids; not like kids today, steeped in this post-anticipation dystopia where the universe virtually bends to their whims. What do millennials do with such a dulled sense of expectation, never to knowing the exquisite longing of flipping through the Sears Catalogue toy section? What’s it like to wake up Christmas morning to find there’s nothing left to unwrap? As P.J. O’Rourke wrote, instant credit killed the dry hump. Nobody saves up for anything anymore. They are raising a generation incapable of deferred enjoyment. So take a stand and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. It’s your life and your weekend so why should you wai… hold on… I…

This week’s POETS Day hero de jour de week is streaming video, not for…

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Roy Campbell despised W.H. Auden. I assume the feeling was reciprocated.

During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell and his family on occasion hid Carmelite Monks in his house in Toledo from Loyalist communists backed by Stalin. It was a sprawling house and the monks not only took refuge, but stowed church documents there. He risked his life, as well as the lives of his wife and daughters, in doing so.

On July 22, 1936, Republican militia murdered seventeen Carmelites in the streets, among them former guests of the Campbell house. Suspecting ties, militiamen searched though the home. The family, fearing such a possibility, was able to clean out crucifixes and icons from the house but there was no time to remove the trunk of papers from the monastery from the front hall. Peter Alexander, author of Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography wrote, “The search of the house was thorough, but though the militiamen leaned their rifles on the Carmelite trunk, they never thought of opening it.” Alexander points out that possession of a missal could have meant death. One of the communists found Campbell’s copy of The Divine Comedy and yelled “Italian!” and then quickly “Fascist!” Alexander again: “But Campbell, with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them that he was neutral.”